Gluttony and Sexual Immorality and Their Cures

Let me make this clearer, not only by a short discussion as well as I can, but by proof from Scripture too. Gluttony and sexual immorality exist in us naturally, for sometimes they spring up without any prompting from the mind, simply at the movement and allurement of the flesh. Yet if they are to be carried through, they must find an object outside us, and so they take effect only through bodily acts. For “each one is tempted by his own desire. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is completed, brings forth death.” The first Adam could not have fallen prey to gluttony unless he had had material food at hand and had used it wrongly. Nor could the second Adam be tempted without the enticement of some object, when it was said to him: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” And it is clear to everyone that sexual immorality too is completed only by a bodily act, as God says of this spirit to the blessed Job: “His force is in his loins, and his strength in the navel of his belly.” [a]

So these two faults in particular, which are carried out with the help of the flesh, especially need bodily abstinence as well as spiritual care of the soul. The resolve of the mind is not enough on its own to resist their attacks, as it sometimes is with anger or gloom or the other passions, which an effort of the mind alone can overcome without any mortifying of the flesh. The body must be chastened as well, by means of fasting and vigils and acts of contrition, and to this must be added a change of place. Since these sins come from faults of both mind and body, they can be overcome only by the joint efforts of both. The blessed apostle does say, in general terms, that all faults are of the flesh, since he lists enmities and anger and heresies among the other works of the flesh. Yet to cure them and to discover their nature more exactly, we divide them in two: some we call carnal, that is, of the flesh, and some spiritual. We call carnal those that have to do especially with pampering the appetites of the flesh, which so charm and satisfy it that sometimes it stirs up the mind when it is at rest, and even drags it against its will into consenting to its desire. Of these the blessed apostle says: “In which we too all once walked in the desires of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and of our thoughts, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest.” But we call spiritual those that spring only from the impulse of the mind. They not only give the flesh no pleasure, but actually bring on it a weakness that harms it, and they feed only a diseased mind with the food of a most miserable pleasure. So these need a single medicine, for the heart; but the carnal ones, as we said, can be cured only by a double remedy.

That is why it is extremely useful for those who aim at purity to begin by taking away from themselves the material that feeds these carnal passions, from which an opportunity for these desires, or the memory of them, can arise in a soul that is still affected by the evil. For a complicated disease needs a complicated remedy. From the body, the object and material that would entice it must be taken away, so that lust does not try to break out into act. And before the mind we should no less carefully set diligent meditation on Scripture, watchful concern, and withdrawal into solitude, so that it does not give birth to desire even in thought. But as for the other faults, living among our fellows is no obstacle. Indeed, it is of the greatest possible use to those who truly want to be rid of them. For in mixing with others they more often meet with rebuke, and as they are provoked more often, the faults show themselves, and so they are cured by speedy remedies.